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Lady Liberty, Inspiring Even in Pieces

Part of Danh Vo's “We the People,” outside the Art Institute of Chicago.Credit
Peter Wynn Thompson for The New York Times

OVER the past two years Danh Vo has been recasting a life-size Statue of Liberty from 30 tons of copper sheets the width of just two pennies — same as the original. Rather than assemble the hundreds of sections, Mr. Vo has shipped the giant elements — disorienting in their gleaming raw material and fragmentation — to some 15 sites around the world after they roll off the production line in China. Starting Sunday an ear, some hair, part of a heel and portions of drapery will be on view at the Art Institute of Chicago while more pieces that echo both minimalist sculptures and remnants from antiquity are scattered around the campus of the University of Chicago.

“If you engage in building a monumental thing, you should also be able to treat it as water,” said Mr. Vo, who referred to his re-creation, titled “We the People,” as both a monster and a virus that can move fluidly and mutate as it is shuffled to new places. He said he hopes that after production is finished this fall, every piece will be visible somewhere at a certain moment.

This 37-year-old conceptual artist, who grew up in Copenhagen after his family fled Vietnam by boat in 1979 and was rescued by a Danish freighter, had never actually seen the statue when he began. But he was hooked by the discovery that its shell was so thin. “It’s such a strong icon, tracing back to so many histories, and then just discovering the fragility of it,” said Mr. Vo, a finalist for the Guggenheim’s Hugo Boss Prize this year. “I thought it would be interesting to make something that people felt so familiar with, in all the different ways that people project on the sculpture, and try to destabilize your own thinking of it.”

Resistant to assigning specific meaning to such a potent symbol of freedom, Mr. Vo prefers instead to talk about the logistics and economics of his project. Yet interpretation is unavoidable for Susanne Ghez, director of the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, who organized a gallery exhibition of Mr. Vo’s work titled “Uterus,” also opening Sunday, as well as the campus installation of “We the People.”

“It raises the question of democratization in the U.S. and our history of imperialism,” she said. “Are the elements spreading this democratization or is the comment more skeptical, that it’s in tatters today?”

Lisa Dorin, an associate curator at the Art Institute who collaborated with Ms. Ghez on bringing “We the People” to Chicago, added: “Danh has a beautiful way of finding issues that are important in a global sense and weaving in his own biography. It kind of sneaks in there and gives you something that you’re not expecting.”

The fabrication involved in “We the People” is unusual for Mr. Vo. More typically he collects culturally loaded ready-made objects through eBay, estate sales, travel and negotiation. These include the typewriter on which Ted Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, composed his manifesto in 1995. Mr. Vo juxtaposed it with the 1945 wedding announcement of the future parents of President George W. Bush.

“I think of it as the range of what we can claim as freedom,” said Mr. Vo, who placed these objects on top of a stack of raw copper sheets to introduce the first exhibition of “We the People” at Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel, Germany, last November.

Mr. Vo has been based in Berlin since 2005, after finishing school in Frankfurt, where he went after quitting painting at the Royal Academy in Copenhagen. He touched down briefly last month for an interview at a sparse studio apartment he keeps in New York, after traveling in the footsteps of Caravaggio in Italy and before heading to Mexico, California, Vancouver and finally Chicago for the installation of his shows.

Mr. Vo, who has a way of being open and elliptical at the same time, says it suits him temperamentally to move unencumbered from place to place. “The way you live your life, that’s the cradle of the works you’re producing and the thinking as well,” he said. Often the information or material he acquires along the way becomes the basis of artworks.

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One example is a set of letters now on view at the Renaissance Society, written by Henry A. Kissinger when he was secretary of state in the 1970s to the newspaper columnist Leonard Lyons, which Mr. Vo bought at auction. “All the letters are about thanking Leonard for tickets he would provide for Kissinger,” said Mr. Vo. “In one he writes he’s sorry he couldn’t attend this ballet, but Leonard must understand that if he was allowed, he would prefer that anytime over contemplating Cambodia.

“That’s a quite wild thing as a letter. He was conducting this secret war and bombing of Cambodia.”

Mr. Vo built a tunnel-like space, with the letters embedded in the walls in vitrines, that viewers pass through to enter the exhibition. “The information is just there.”

“Danh is an excellent poker player, very unsentimental in his approach to the game,” said Michael Elmgreen, half of the collaborative Elmgreen & Dragset, who became friends with Mr. Vo in Berlin. “Historical facts as well as the present reality or even personal context are his instruments, the cards in his hand, and the rules of the game are set by the art world itself.”

Mr. Vo discovered another letter, a beautiful farewell written to his father by a French missionary working in Asia on the eve of his execution, one of many killings that precipitated the French colonization of Vietnam in the mid-19th century. Mr. Vo asked his own father, Phung Vo, a Roman Catholic who ran small food businesses for 30 years in his transplanted home of Denmark, to rewrite the French letter in his exceptional penmanship. “It activated something he was very good at but that he never used,” said Mr. Vo, who asked his father to send an original transcription of the letter to anyone requesting it for 100 euros and to archive all the exchanges. More than 200 of the transcriptions have spread virally to individuals and institutions around the world, in a way that recalls both “We the People” and missionary work.

His father also played a role in Mr. Vo’s quest to purchase three spectacular glass chandeliers from the ballroom of the former Hotel Majestic in Paris, where the peace accord was reached among the Americans, North Vietnamese, South Vietnamese and Vietcong in 1973, which was supposed to have ended the Vietnam War. “Of course history turns out to be different,” Mr. Vo said of the north’s aggression into the south in 1975 after the withdrawal of American troops. He shows a photograph from the front page of The New York Times with one chandelier hovering over the drama at the negotiating table. When he found out the hotel was being sold several years ago, he entered into his own negotiations to buy the chandeliers.

During the process he took his father to the ballroom in Paris. “In the taxi he complained that we were going to the room of death and betrayal,” said Mr. Vo, who presented one chandelier, disassembled, last year on the floor at the Museum of Modern Art, which acquired the piece. “Then when we entered the room, the only thing out of his mouth was, ‘I think the Queen of Denmark must have such things in her castle.’

“That was so beautiful and gave this layer to the work I find necessary. Besides our projected ideas of them, these objects were designed to make you forget.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 23, 2012, on Page AR23 of the New York edition with the headline: Lady Liberty, Inspiring Even in Pieces. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe